An Evaluation of Different Evolutionary Approaches Applied in the Process of Automatic Transcription of Music Scores into Tablatures

The problem of converting a music in standard music notation (music sheet) to the alternative notation of guitar tablature is known as transcription. The process of transcription consists of indicating where each note from the original music sheet needs to be played in the guitar, i.e. which string and fret of the guitar that needs to be played to produce a particular note. However, considering that each note can be played in different positions of the guitar fretboard, this is not a straightforward process, and can be classified as a combinatorial optimization problem. For this reason, we have employed a comparative study of different algorithms: A-star, genetic algorithms (GA), genetic algorithms based on subpopulations (GA-SP), ant colony optimization (ACO) and differential evolution (DE). It was also included heuristics based on local search 2-opt and 3-opt in the approaches GA, GA-SP and DE. The experimental results with a dataset of 87 musics indicated that the approaches ACO, GA-SP with 2-opt and GA with 2-opt reached the best performance. Also, the results obtained with each approach were statistically compared using ANOVA test with post hoc Tukey.